Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Reprinted with the author's permission, from her blog God is in the Dirt which we highly recommend; Sara Stratton's recent articles range from California to Newfoundland, the Appalachians in Ohio, and Toronto.

The Common Sense Sabbatical (3 Aug 2012)

The focus of my sabbatical is the land we inhabit. How does it
shape us? How do we shape it? And what role does our faith (in my case,
liberal Christian) have to do with it? I began this exploration with a
week in California at the home of Elaine Enns and Ched Myers, otherwise
known as the Bartimaeus Institute, in a course called “Rooting Faith:
Theology and Practices of Bioregional Discipleship” — a time for us to
reflect biblically and theologically on the land, and to learn more
about permaculture.

An old California oak under which we did some good thinking and reflecting.

As our permacuture specialist Chris Grataski noted, permaculture has
about a million definitions. At heart, it is a form of agriculture that
is based on mimicking naturally occurring ecosystems — so for example,
rather than cycling the same annual crops in and out of the same piece
of chemically enriched soil, you try to create an agricultural ecosystem
that, through living and dying, is able to nourish and sustain itself.
The more I heard Chris talk about permaculture, the more I remembered
Indigenous agricultural traditions like the companion (or closely
grouped) growing of the three sisters (beans, corn, and squash), wherein
the beans fix nitrogen in the soil for the other crops, the corn
provides a structure up which the beans can climb, and the squash forms a
kind of living mulch, keeping the soil damp and preventing the growth
of weeds. (It makes a pretty nice soup, too, by the way.)
The more Chris taught us — double-digging rather than mechanically
tilling, building a garden bed by sheet mulching — the more I imagined
my grandmothers working their mixed gardens in Safe Harbour in the 1920s
or 30s, tilling the soil by hand, adding natural organic fertilizers
(capelin!) and moving things around year to year. “Why, it’s like common
sense!” I blurted out one afternoon, and that got one of Chris’s
infrequent but large, generous, and thoughtful grins.
What exactly is a sheet mulch bed, you ask? Why, it’s when you take this dry patch
Add a layer of cardboard
Then a thick layer of straw or hay — it can even be mouldy! This and
some other dry brown garden waste mimic the older material you would
find falling in a natural ecosystem such as a forest.
Then a layer of green waste — this mimics the newer material an ecosystem sheds.
A heavy layer of manure and compost — we all know what this mimics.
And then finally we have something into which we can plant
Elaine plants a Viburnum opulus, known as Kalyna in her
ancestral home of Ukraine, where it has great cultural resonance,
signifying both struggle and the rootedness of family. Also known as
cramp bark, in folk medicine this plant was used by women all over the
world to deal with menstrual and childbirth pain.
Building this garden, which took a couple of days on our part and
even more of Chris’s and Elaine’s energy in the planning and gathering
of raw materials, was hard work but it feels good to have been a part of
something that will continue to grow, feeding itself and providing
beauty and healing to all who seek it. The work of my hands, together
with others’, is now a part of this place in the oak chaparral of
Southern California.
But what we did there is a very small piece, as Wendell Berry reminds us in his foreword to theologian Ellen F. Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible.

We have been given the earth to live, not on but with and
from, and only on the condition that we care properly for it. We did
not make it, and we know little about it. In fact we don’t, and will
never, know enough about it to make our survival sure or our lives
carefree. Our relation to our land will always remain, to a significant
extent, mysterious. Therefore, our use of it must be determined more by
reverence and humility, by local memory and affection, than by the
knowledge that we now call “objective” or “scientific.” Above all, we
must not damage it permanently or compromise its natural means of
sustaining itself. The best farmers have always accepted this …

Getting to Know the Neighbours (12 August 2012)

Part of getting to know your “place” is getting to know who shares
it with you. You can really only do this by getting out in the open and
seeing what’s out there. I’ve been doing this for a few years now in the
backyard and larger neighbourhood of my east end Toronto home.
Admittedly, it’s a great way to relax, but it’s also becoming for me a
kind of spiritual practice. The American poet and environmentalist Gary
Snyder talks about it in his book The Practice of the Wild:

The pathless world of wild nature is a surprising school
and those who have lived through her can be tough and funny teachers.
Out here one is in constant engagement with countless plants and
animals. To be well educated is to have learned the songs, proverbs,
stories, sayings, myths (and technologies) that come with this
experiencing of the nonhuman members of the local ecological community.
Practice in the field, “open country,” is foremost. Walking is the great
adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul
primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and
humility.

The institute that I attended this summer, “Rooting Faith: Theology and Practices of Bioregional Discipleship,” was hosted by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns,
who define their “place” as a semi-rural garden and the Southern
Californian watershed in which it is situated. They moved there from Los
Angeles (where Elaine had moved from Saskatchewan!) a few years ago,
and part of the program was accompanying them as they learned more about
their place. In the process of becoming a permacuture site, their
garden was fragrant with sage, and full of produce like tomatilloes,
oranges, and peaches. A Brazilian pepper tree just outside their fence
spilled its spicy seeds over the ground.
And there were cacti everywhere — propagated by breaking off one fat
pad and sticking it in the soil … up would come another cactus!
I found great beauty in what we observed on our first morning there,
in the dry but still resinous sage whose scent we breathed in deeply,
and in the lessons we drew from the Old Testament about humanity’s
inability to further perfect what exists in nature. A phrase remains:
“nothing we can make can mediate God more faithfully than what God has
made.” But in reviewing my notes of that morning, I saw this scribbled
down in a margin: “Western scrubjay. Northern mockingbird. Hummingbirds.
Hawks. Vultures. Woodpeckers working lightpole. (Very active
10:15-10:40.)”
It was an acorn woodpecker and he spent the entire week excavating a
series of utility poles. In so doing, he became to me the visual emblem
of another phrase from our discussion: “We have grown up in landscapes
that Creator did not make.” And, I might add, that nature herself has
not relinquished to us, despite what we may think. Thank you, acorn
woodpecker.
We also walked through Ched’s and Elaine’s place taking in the oak
chapparal — a landscape that I had never heard of before this trip.
Invoke “Mediterranean landscape,” though and it’s more familiar — hot,
dry summers and scrubby, fragrant drought-resistant plants. Here I
watched lark sparrows run through the scrub.
We sat in a dry riverbed (dry for a number of reasons: seasonal water
flow, damming and diversion for drinking and recreation, global climate
climate change):
A mockingbird sat nearby and sang his many tunes before our ambling flushed him:
And I watched turkey vultures tip-tip-tip overhead, looking down carefully at us.
Under huge, ancient California oaks, we talked about where we were,
and while I engaged in this, I was also always just off to the side of
everyone else, trying to determine who was with us.
Another trip, this one to the 80 acres of Appalachian Ohio and the larger environs that Julie Zickefoose and Bill Thompson III
define as their “place,” — and the neighbours were much more apparent.
Julie’s and Bill’s effort to provide a place of refuge for wildlife
(primarily but not exclusively birds) displaced by urbanization,
large-scale farming, and the extraction of fossil fuels (oil and natural
gas) has resulted in a rich biodiversity: as I write this, they’ve seen
187 avian species on their property (known as Indigo Hill for all the
indigo buntings that live there) and the place is crawling with snakes,
turtles and amphibians of all sorts.
This is one of the box turtles we met on one of our walks:
A very special box turtle, as it happens. Turns out it is Shelly,
whom Julie rescued from urban Marietta, OH, when it was about the size
of a slider (you know, the mini hamburgers). Three years later, Shelly
was big enough to be released. And she was, in August 2011. And then in
July 2012, she ambled right across our path. Much to the delight of her
foster turtlemom.
You can read Julie’s account of Shelly’s early days, the moment we found her, and see Shelly in action on Julie’s blog.
Every day, we saw bluebirds. Here, my partner Kelly holds a bunch in her hands.
These little ones are here because Julie has built safe boxes in
which bluebird parents can nest and raise a brood or two each summer.
This was a good year — several pairs had three broods.The bluebirds are a
great example of knowing your place and who lives there in the negative
sense — while bluebirds have made a comeback, they have needed human
help because humans have hurt them so much. Destroying habitat for
farmland and cities, spraying pesticides that poison the food the
parents gather, importing house sparrows from Europe that peck the life
out of eggs and chicks — these human actions have all had a deleterious
effect on the eastern bluebird. Julie’s nest boxes are a “bluebird
trail,” part of an effort begun in the 1960s to provide safe heaven for
these beautiful birds. Here Julie checks another nest to make sure it’s
free of parasites now that the eggs are hatching.
Indigo Hill is also full of ruby-throated hummingbirds, drawn not
just by sugar solution in feeders but also by thick plantings of
cardinal flower and salvia. There’s a rule, tested by dedicated
hummingbird watchers, that you count the maximum number of hummers you
see using your food source, and you multiply that by 6 to get an
accurate figure of how many there are. The highest we counted at one
time on this trip was 12 — so 72 hummingbirds on this territory,
sharing this place. Compared to past years, that’s a low number.
Walks in the broader environs brought other neighbours. This is a Green Frog, Rana clamitans:
A dogbane beetle.
Butterflies, pooling on a country road to glean phosphorus. The
yellow ones are eastern tiger swallowtails; the black ones are, I think,
a mixture of female black morph eastern swallowtails and spicebush
swallowtails. The difference is in the number and placement of orange
spots, the quality of the blue, and the shape of the little tails on
each wing.
This is the female black morph:
I have never seen so many butterflies: blues, sulphurs, skippers,
hairstreaks, satyrs, and fritillaries. I’ll need to spend time poring
over photos and guidebooks to determine just what I saw, but –this being
her place– Julie knew them all at first glance. Well, almost all — she
had to puzzle out a couple at home, because she thought she saw
something new for the area, a county record. And in fact she had. She
knows her place and what lives there with her. And it’s a far cry from
the monarchs, cabbage whites, red admirals and eastern commas that I am
used to in my own place!

What of my own place? I’ve defined it within this city of 2.5 million
people as an area easily travelled within an hour on foot or with some
streetcar assistance. It extends from my 30 x 100 foot urban lot to
Toronto’s eastern beaches, the Leslie Spit, and the Glen Stewart and
Taylor-Massey ravines. Squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, beavers, coyote,
rabbits, and red foxes all live here, as do garter snakes and eastern
painted turtles. Butterflies, moths and insects. I have seen well over
100 species of birds here, including a snowy owl. We have counted 68
bird species in our backyard alone, everything from redbreasted nuthatch
to scarlet tanager to redtailed hawk.
But a recent facebook exchange makes me wonder how well I know my
place and those who share it with me. Seeking some wisdom on home
improvements, I posted this update:

We are planning to replace our roof this year. We live in
a bungalow in a raccoon-intensive neighbourhood and so animal damage
and break-in are not uncommon (though so far we’ve only had damage, not
squatters!). We’re therefore considering a metal roof and are seeking
opinions from those of you who may have them.

My friend Richard, a United Church minister in the neighbourhood,
replied that he couldn’t help but read the post from the raccoon’s point
of view, wondering what it must feel like to live in such a
“human-intensive neighbourhood.”
Do you, like Ched and Elaine, like Julie and Bill, like Kelly and me,
have a practice of walking (or running, biking, or canoeing) around
what you define as your place?
What do you see when you do?
Who do you see?